Two recent pieces of scientific evidence really hammer home the predicament of modern industrial civilization, and they have to do with the fact that our globalized, just-in-time economic model is hopelessly wed to carbon-based energy. Once one understands this, then there can be no delusions about why we are on such a catastrophic trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions. As was explained in a previous post, GDP is fundamentally and directly linked to CO2 emissions. Below, two graphs(click to go to source) illustrate this fact:

It’s not really about evil fossil fuel companies, although they do certainly exert enormous political clout and do conspire to protect their business model by doing such things as spreading doubt on climate change science, but as with all corporations, externalizing social and environmental costs is endemic to the profit system and the coercive forces of competition in capitalist markets.

This clearly shows we are firmly on track for hitting 3.2-5.4°C warming by the end of the century or sooner. This kind of rapid warming is incompatible with most life on Earth. To get an idea of what the world will be like at 3°C once lag time catches up to real time, we can look back 3 million years ago in the Pliocene Era when CO2 levels were similar to today and temperatures were 3°C warmer:

The northern hemisphere was free of glaciers and icesheets, beech trees grew in the Transantarctic mountains, sea levels were 25 metres higher [Climate Dynamics, 26, 249-365], and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 360-400 ppm, very similar to today. There are also strong indications that during the Pliocene, permanent El Nino conditions prevailed. Hansen says that rapid warming today is already heating up the western Pacific Ocean, a basis for a coming period of ‘super El Ninos’ [Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 103, 39, 14288-93]…

…The collapse of the Amazon is part of the reversal of the carbon cycle projected to happen around 3 degrees, a view confirmed by a range of researchers using carbon coupled climate models. Vast amounts of dead vegetation stored in the soil – more than double the entire carbon content of the atmosphere – will be broken down by bacteria as soil warms. The generally accepted estimate is that the soil carbon reservoir contains some 1600 gigatonnes, more than double the entire carbon content of the atmosphere…

…Three degrees would likely see increasing areas of the planet being rendered essentially uninhabitable by drought and heat. Rainfall in Mexico and central America is projected to fall 50 per central. Southern Africa would be exposed to perennial drought, a huge expanse centred on Botswana could see a remobilisation of old sand dunes [Nature, 435, 1218-21], much as is projected to happen earlier in the US west. The Rockies would be snowless and the Colorado river will fail half the time. Drought intensity in Australia could triple, according to the CSIRO, which also predicts days in NSW above 35 degrees will increase 2 to 7 times.

With extreme weather continuing to bite – hurricanes may increase in power by half a category above today’s top-level Category Five – world food supplies will be critically endangered. This could mean hundreds of millions – or even billions – of refugees moving out from areas of famine and drought in the sub-tropics towards the mid-latitudes. As the Himalayan ice sheet relentlessly melts with rising temperatures, the long-term water flows into Asia’s great rivers and breadbasket valleys — the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Mekong, Yangtse and Yellow rivers — will fall dramatically. If global temperatures rise by three degrees, and that’s becoming the un-official target for western governments, water flow in the Indus is predicted to drop by 90 per cent by 2100. The lives of two billion people are at stake.

As the Arctic continue to warm, melting permafrost in the boreal forests and further north in the Arctic tundra is now starting to melt, triggering the release of methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than CO2, from thick layers of thawing peat. The West Siberian bog is estimated to contain 70 billion tonnes of CO2. Prof. Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Russia’s Tomsk State University, says: “There’s a critical barrier… Once global warming pushes the melting process past that line, it begins to perpetuate itself.” The West Antarctic ice sheet would likely to irreversibly melt.

At 5-6°C:

Five degrees
• Five degrees of warming occurred during the Eocene, 55 million years ago: breadfruit trees grew on the coast of Greenland, while the Arctic Ocean saw water temperatures of 20C within 200km of the North Pole itself. There was no ice at either pole; forests were probably growing in central Antarctica.
• The Eocene greenhouse event was likely caused by methane hydrates (an ice-like combination of methane and water) bursting into the atmosphere from the seabed in an immense “ocean burp”, sparking a surge in global temperatures. Today vast amounts of these same methane hydrates still sit on subsea continental shelves.
• The early Eocene greenhouse took at least 10,000 years to come about. Today we could accomplish the same feat in less than a century.

Six degrees
• At the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago, up to 95% of species were extinct as a result of a super-greenhouse event, resulting in a temperatures rise by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene.
• One scientific paper investigating “kill mechanisms” during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions “could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely”. Acting much like today’s fuel-air explosives (or “vacuum bombs”), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Another valuable website worth reading describes, degree by degree, the changes that will happen to the Earth from anthropogenic global warming. Due to the unpredictable nature of the internet and web pages disappearing, I have saved that essay as an entire screenshot here.

Keep in mind that the IPCC, an institution that has consistently underestimated the effects of anthropogenic climate change, states that in order to stay below 2°C of warming, emissions will have to be 40-70% lower than they were in 2010 by 2050 and at zero by the end of the century, “or could possibly even require taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, a controversial proposition.” As the Keeling Curve grows ever steeper year after year, the Hail Mary of a techno-fix inevitably becomes the only option left. However, concomitant with the CO2 problem is the acidification of the oceans which will require a miracle solution as well. As was explained in a previous post, if all emissions stopped yesterday, we would still be locked into a warming of 2.65°C.

If carbon dioxide levels reach 800 ppm, ocean pH is projected to drop another .3 to .4 units (Today we have measured a decline of .1 pH units from 8.2 to 8.1 in the last century) – one of the scenarios projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by 2100 –raising levels of hydrogen ion, H +, 100 to 150 percent (Orr et al., 2005). As this happens and it will take “tens of thousands of years” for the chemistry of the oceans to return to pre-industrial levels, at least that is what the Royal Society of Britain proclaims. – link

We’re already seeing massive die-offs of oysters and scallops from an acidification (PH-decline) of 0.1PH, but what would happen at a drop of 0.3-0.4 units(150+% more acidic than at the beginning of the industrial revolution)?:

“…we found that reef development ceased below pH level 7.7… Ultimately, what we observed was that the diversity of reefs progressively declines with increasing CO2. At concentrations similar to those predicted for the end of this century at a ‘business as usual’ emissions scenario, the “coral reef” observed was depauperate and lacked the structural complexity of present healthy tropical coral reefs. These changes are simply due to ocean acidification, i.e., even without the projected +2°C warming of the oceans associated with rising greenhouse gases. The 0.5° warming we have already observed in the tropics in the last 50 years has already caused mass coral bleaching events and declining coral calcification.” – link

…The authors of the report, released today from the Third Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World, review the current science on the effects on marine organisms, and write that there is a “medium confidence” level that shellfish harvests will decline. There is also a medium confidence level that economic damage will result from impacts on coral reefs, with tourism, food and shoreline protection suffering. The size of this is unclear but one estimate is for $1 trillion in damage from coral loss alone.

How larger species will fare as oceans acidify is less clear. The report gives only a “low confidence” rating to the idea that top predators and fin fish catches will be reduced. But any losses in this area could hit hard the 540 million people whose livelihoods depend on such fisheries.

Scientists also have a “very high confidence” that the ocean’s capacity to take up carbon decreases as waters acidify. So even larger cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions than currently envisaged may be needed to meet targets set to limit global warming as a result, the authors write….

…The report authors also say that the acidity of the oceans could increase by 170% by the end of the century, corresponding to a drop in surface ocean pH by 0.32. This occurs under a pessimistic scenario of high human emissions. Since the industrial revolution, surface ocean pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1. As pH is a logarithmic scale, the increase in acidity since the industrial revolution could reach around 170% under this scenario.

Under lower-emissions scenarios, this decrease would be around 0.07. But current emissions show no sign of dropping to those necessary to achieve such a goal, cautions Riebesell.

“If you look at current trajectories we’re no way below the [high emissions scenario],” Riebesell says. “Of course we hope the human race is smart enough to learn at some point and turn the wheel round.” – link

As long as the shelves in the local grocery store are filled with relatively cheap food, the television is broadcasting the usual “bread and circus”, water is flowing from the faucet, and other creature comforts of industrial civilization are on tap, homo economicus will blithely ride into the dark future of mass extinction, tectonic shifts of the biosphere, and the collapse of an unsustainable lifestyle.

CNN is running a program of their newscasters’ family roots. Why do I feel like this is a slick PR campaign to put a main street face on the mainstream media? Sorry, but I still don’t trust them and we’re still on track for the collapse of modern civilization despite all their smug smiles.

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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51 thoughts on “Still on Track for the Collapse of Modern Civilization”

Reblogged this on GarryRogers Nature Conservation and commented:
More than just the likely collapse of human civilization, our power dash toward a warmer world has already wiped out more than half our wildlife. Most will die if we keep it up.

Mike…….. I’m puzzled as to why you published the bit about CO2 levels doubling by 2100 when we are clearly heading into a serious energy crunch, and emissions must surely slow down dramatically as the economy tanks…….

You obviously haven’t heard about Peak Oil and Peak Coal. They occur when there are still masses of reserves still left in the ground. Once the rate of extraction falls below demand, as it did for oil in 2008, the price shoots up and kills demand (and the economy).

You base most of the article on the temperature rise predicted for RCP8.5, but the rate of fossil fuel production in that scenario is utterly impossible to anyone that understands Peak Fossils. Even RCP2.6 is too high for Peakists, and that only has a temperature range of +0.9 – 2.3°C.

You apparently haven’t looked around this website to notice all the peak fossil fuel videos and articles on the sidebar. And you have not read the article either which states that even if all emissions stopped yesterday, we still have a warming of 2.65°C locked in.

Peak oil/peak coal will not and has not saved us from climate chaos. It’s too late.

The Overpeck chart above shows that RCP2.6 produces temperature increases in the range 0.9 – 2.3°C so all of that range is less than your 2.65°C. Peakists (Aleklett, Hook, et al) believe RCP2.6 is itself too high, so why do you base your argument on the range for RCP8.5 ?

You can’t believe in Peak Fossils and also believe in RCP8.5’s rates of fossil fuels burning.

Interesting stuff indeed, but all I am asking at the moment is if you believe RCP2.6 is too high an emissions scenario for Peak Fossils. If it is, climate change will only amount to +1.5°C by 2045 and falling slowly after that, so we can forget about it compared to the impact and urgency of Peak Fossils itself.

If you need more detail on what RCP2.6 is, I can provide it, but it seems so basic that I would have thought all Peakists would accept it straight away.

The IPCC has a group called Integrated Assessment Model Consortium which is responsible for constructing scenarios that can be validly run through the models and compared. Vuuren is the leader of that team and was tasked with constructing a scenario which produced a +2.0°C peak outcome and then declined. This started out as RCP3PD, and evolved into RCP2.6 .

Perhaps the inconsistency with your +2.65°C value is due to different base dates.

The aerosol forcing figure from Hansen wasn’t actually a directly measured value, but indirectly inferred from ocean temperature measurements – more heat in found the oceans must mean more global dimming from aerosols. His paper does say “Uncertainties in aerosol forcing and ocean mixing (climate response function) imply that there is a family of solutions consistent with observed global warming. The range of acceptable solutions is explored in Fig. 7 via Green’s functions …”

This “committed warming” of past CO2 emissions whose effect will be manifested in the coming decades is about 0.6 degrees Celsius. Adding up the current warming of 0.85°C from the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the loss of aerosols with global dimming at 1.2°C, and the “committed” temperature rise from the 40-year lag time of CO2 emissions equal to 0.6°C, we get a total of 2.65°C. If all industrial activity stopped right now, we would already be committed to 2.65°C, a global average temperature rise of three times what we are currently experiencing.

Instructive explanation of the core problem, i.e. capitalism is not compatible with a living planet:

…unfortunately, on top of all the many other reasons climate change action is difficult, the crisis has come at an unusually bad time: Klein notes that the period around 1990 when climate change first became widely known was also the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet-style communism, when neo-liberal capitalism won out as the dominant politico-economic ideology, so much so that anything else became inconceivable. It was also a period of increased free trade, for instance seeing the formation of NAFTA and the takeoff of globalisation.

This style of capitalism Klein sees as incompatible with any form of environmentalism. She defines its relationship with both planet and people as “extractivism”, which

… is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continue. Extractivism is the mentality of the mountaintop remover and the old-growth clear-cutter. It is the reduction of life into objects for the use of others, giving them no integrity or value of their own–turning living complex ecosystems into “natural resources,” mountains into “overburden” (as the mining industry terms the forests, rocks, and streams that get in the way of its bulldozers). It is also the reduction of human beings either into labor to be brutally extracted, pushed beyond limits, or, alternatively, into social burden, problems to be locked out at borders and locked away in prisons…

This isn’t totally a product of the last twenty-five years: both industrialisation and colonialism depended on similar principles, but both its scale and the severity of its effects have expanded massively recently.

Action on climate change therefore cannot be separated from action to reform our socio-economic system, and here the climate denialists have a point when they claim global warming is “anti-American” or takes away our freedom. The right wing thought they could enjoy their victory over all other forms of economics, but their window of opportunity has proved to be very small indeed.

[They have a] deep fear that if the free market system really has set in motion physical and chemical processes that, if allowed to continue unchecked, threaten large parts of humanity at an existential level, then their entire crusade to morally redeem capitalism has been for naught. With stakes like these, clearly greed is not so very good after all. And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time–whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

In fact, despite their pseudo-scientific bluster, climate denialists probably have a better handle on the situation than many “moderate” climate groups who are trying, but generally failing, to change things through gradual action inside the system. That strategy worked well in the more environment-friendly times of the 1960s and 1970s (between Silent Spring and Ronald Reagan) but not since. Amongst other problems, it fell foul of the principle that humans do not, and cannot, take complete control of Planet Earth: the doctrine of “dominion”.

There is extensive critique of many environmental organisations and individuals for both their rhetoric and relationships. Some are funded directly or indirectly by fossil fuel companies and other polluters. Others either water down or over-palatise their message:

Moreover, in the name of reaching across the aisle, green groups are constantly “reframing” climate action so that it is about pretty much anything other than preventing catastrophic warming to protect life on earth.

So what needs to happen? First, environmentalism needs to be linked to fundamental economic reform. We need to argue for an end to neo-liberalism, an end to unrestrained economic growth, and an end to extreme economic inequality. The last is needed both on moral grounds, including that people who have benefitted from long-term environmental pollution should pay for it, and also on the practical grounds that the poor have enough on their plate already and cannot be obliged to pay for their own climate adaptation too…

FRONTLINE investigates the widespread use of antibiotics in food animals and whether it is fueling the growing crisis of antibiotic resistance in people. Plus an exclusive interview with the family of a young man who died in a superbug outbreak that swept through a hospital at the National Institutes of Health.

Ebola is airborne, according to a new report by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. Researchers at the university just advised the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that “scientific and epidemiologic evidence” now exists that proves Ebola has the potential to be transmitted via exhaled breath and “infectious aerosol particles.”

University of Minnesota CIDRAP scientists are now warning both health care providers and the general public that surgical facemasks will not prevent the transmission of Ebola. According to the airborne Ebola report, medical workers must immediately be given full-hooded protective gear and powered air-purifying respirators. CIDRAP has reportedly been a worldwide leader in addressing public health and safety concerns and preparedness since 2001.

“Ebola anxiety spread rapidly on social media Wednesday when inaccurate articles and tweets claimed that University of Minnesota infectious disease experts had determined the deadly virus has become airborne — a claim quickly shot down by the U.”http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/279361722.html

of course ebola is technically airborne when the lungs bleed just before death, but only long enough for it to settle down towards the floor where it dies fairly quickly compared to truly airborne viruses which can last several hours in the air.

It’s kind of interesting and sick that the intellectual culture called the 1960s, “time of troubles,” a dangerous period in which a lot of harm was done to the society. And the reason is because we were civilized and that’s dangerous. That increased the commitment to democracy, to rights and so on, and this left people much less obedient.

There’s actually a classic presentation of this which maybe we discussed, so stop me, but the study of The Crisis of Democracy, a very important book which was published. It’s the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which was a group of liberal internationalists. For example, the Carter administration was entirely drawn from their ranks. It’s basically where they come from; so kind of the liberal end of the mainstream spectrum.

The Crisis of Democracy was published in 1975, and it was a discussion of the destructive effect of the 1960s. The destructive effect was that it called for too much democracy. You have to read it to believe it. The picture was that before, people were mostly passive and obedient and they did what they were told and democracy functioned fine.

But in the 1960s, various parts of the population became energized and began to enter the public arena to call for the rights of women, students, young people, old people, farmers and workers. What are called “special interests” – meaning the whole population – they began to press to enter the public arena. And they said that puts too much pressure on the state and therefore we have to have more moderation in democracy and they should go back and be quiet and obedient.

There’s interestingly one group that they never discussed as a special interest, corporate power, which makes sense. That’s the national interest, so we don’t talk about that. But, of course, they have overwhelming control over policy and they particularly singled out the universities. Schools, churches, universities – they describe them as institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young” – their phrase, indoctrination of the young. And they said they’re failing. You can see it because all these young kids are out in the street, opposing the war, calling for women’s rights and so on.

So the young are not being indoctrinated properly and they therefore called for more efforts to – the state, they said, should intervene to ensure that indoctrination takes place properly. They also criticized the media. Anyone who looked at the media could see that it’s overwhelmingly conformist. But there was some criticism. I mean, there were people in the media who were saying, “The war’s too costly. Maybe we shouldn’t continue with it” and so on. And they said even that’s too much. You can’t have the media being this oppositional and critical of power. So maybe the state should step in with some form of censorship and control over the media.

This is the liberal extreme of the spectrum. If you want to see the other extreme, one important thing to look at, which came out around the same time, is the Powell Memorandum. You can pick it up on the internet. This is Justice Powell. He was picked by Nixon to be on the Supreme Court. He was an advisor to the Nixon administration, very right-wing, and he essentially expresses the same views except in a less polite form. And you have to read it to believe it. It was very influential. It was a letter written to the Chamber of Commerce, a business group, but it surfaced pretty quickly. It was supposed to be secret.

But what he essentially says – and the rhetoric is revealing, almost quoting, he says, “Marxists have taken over practically everything. They run the universities. They run the media. There’re overwhelming attacks on business. Business is being persecuted. Nobody’s standing up for business. We’re the persecuted minority and the world is lost,” which is a very interesting illustration of the attitude of people who own everything. If you owned everything and a tiny little piece gets out of control, then your world’s gone. Like some unusual child who has a million toys and one of them is stolen, he’s going to perish.

That’s the standard attitude of people who fundamentally own the world. And then he goes on to talk about how we can deal with this. He says, look, take the universities. The universities are funded by business. The trustees are from the business world. Instead of just allowing the universities to be taken over by Marxists led by Herbert Marcuse and so on, which is such an illusion you can’t even talk about it. Instead of that, he says, “We could discipline them by using the power of the purse, which we have, and we can oppose it and we can defend this.” It’s all defensive. We can defend ourselves from this tremendous attack by using our economic power to sort of allow business a tiny little sector in which it can function.

You really have to read it to get the sense. Well, those are the two ends of the spectrum and out of that comes the whole liberal assault, the population on the colleges, on the schools and so on. So the students are right. There was a big impact and it’s partly illustrated by the reaction, but it’s there. You can see it in all kinds of ways. It’s just a much more civilized world than it was….

In the greatest explosion of complexity since the “Cambrian Explosion”, likely enabled by increasing oxygen levels in the seas and the consequent feasibility of distributing metabolites to deeply embedded cells, the humans have lit the fuse on complexity again through an accelerated evolutionary track that has unlocked the biological treasure of fossil technological metabolites – coal, gas, oil. Unfortunately due to the malignant speed of this transformation and the toxicity of the metabolic by-products, human induced complexity will be short-lived. Let us turn to the cell to find out “who” and “what” we really are and leave the nodding bobbleheads to affirm their faith in disingenuous human mental constructs. To see your true reflection, look into the cell and examine your analogs as busily at work as any human pressed into service of the technological humanoma, gangrenously spreading throughout the biosphere’s body. The consequent complexity of the human-induced “Carbon Explosion” masks its true relationship within the biosphere. Instead of serving as the kernel for long-lasting development and evolution, it serves as the greatest force for destruction and simplification, perhaps within the history of all life. Thermodynamics gave birth to you and determines your fate, and as Stage IV of your development comes to pass, so too shall pass the humanoma we know as technological civilization.

LORINCZ: So the U.S. military itself acknowledges that it is the largest institutional consumer of oil. And the burning of fossil fuels, the burning of petroleum products, oil, is causing the climate crisis. And the U.S. military spends approximately $17 billion on oil, and it needs this oil to fuel its fighter jets, its vehicles, and to power its military bases domestically and internationally. The problem, though, is that the U.S. military emissions and, actually, the military emissions of all countries’ militaries outside their borders are not included in the national greenhouse gas reporting for countries.

WORONCZUK: Why is that?

LORINCZ: It’s something called international aviation and bunker fuels. This is the fuel that’s used by fighter jets and by warships, for example, outside of state borders. So those military emissions are not included in the national greenhouse gas inventory reporting. And the reason why those emissions are not included is because of the lobbying of the United States in the mid-1990s around the Kyoto Protocol. The U.S. delegation at the Kyoto negotiations was able to secure an exemption for military emissions, these international aviation and bunker fuels, and it was also able to secure, under UN Framework Convention on Climate Change guidelines, a confidentiality clause so that it actually doesn’t need to report all of its emissions and it doesn’t have to dis-aggregate its emissions.So right now countries need to abide by the UN Framework Convention guidelines on reporting for greenhouse gases in all different types of sectors, so for transportation, for energy, for buildings, etc. But the military is not a separate category, and the military has these exemptions. It is required to report its energy use in fuel use domestically, but not internationally. And the United States military is operating all over the world, and all of those greenhouse gas emissions that it’s emitting around the world in its wars overseas, in its thousand bases overseas, those emissions are exempt from its reporting.

WORONCZUK: And I imagine, then, that if all these are exempt from the national tally, that this must have a significant effect on the figures that are used to make things like emission targets.

LORINCZ: Absolutely. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the three working group assessment reports that have just been released over the last ten months, none of those three documents refer to military emissions. And the calculations and the analysis that the intergovernmental panel on climate change is using, it exempts these emissions. So it’s not a full analysis of the emissions and the projections of the IPCC going forward, the kind of reductions that we need for greenhouse gases. They are not including the military emissions. So the forward projections for the IPCC are not adequate, because they’re not including a big bulk of the emissions that are coming right now from the military. It’s not just the U.S. military. It’s–all countries’ militaries have these exemptions. And so the kind of reductions that we need to see for the future are even deeper than what the IPCC is saying. We need to–the military needs to be a sector that the IPCC is considering and is considering as it’s part of its decarbonization pathways. And right now it’s not. And it must be, because we will not be on track to stabilize the climate, to limit the increase in global mean temperatures by two degrees if we don’t include the military. The military emissions, if they continue to be exempt, will keep us off track, and we will not be able to stabilize the climate.

WORONCZUK: Yeah, and this is an important point to make, because from the climate scientists that we’ve interviewed on The Real News, they’ve all–have basically said that the IPCC reports are conservative in nature…

“It is time to educate the masses about what free market capitalism really means.

The entire philosophy of the free market is that it is reactive, not pro-active. As Rand Paul and Paul Ryan are so fond of saying, the market “corrects” and “adapts”. It is part of the core philosophy of the economic model.

Think about the way you were taught in school that a free market would “fix the problem” of, for example, a corporation that made bad products:

1) People would buy products from the company

2) People would be disappointed by those products

3) People would stop buying products from that company

4) That company goes out of business

At the ground level, that is how free market capitalism produces better products: it is driven by consumer reaction.

Let’s look at another scenario: how does the free market “regulate itself” when it comes to companies making poisonedproducts?

1) People buy products from the company

2) People die

3) The remaining people do not buy products from that company any more

4) That company goes out of business

Tah dah! The market has regulated itself. But if you are a real free market fanatic, you have to embrace step 2. That is: part of the process of the “market regulating itself” involves PEOPLE DYING.

You can’t escape it. Part of the process. The only motivation that companies have, in a free market, to produce products that don’t kill their customers is that if their customers ACTUALLY DIEthen they might lose business.

The only time that companies ever increase safety of their procedures is after a plant has exploded or a pipeline has leaked, and something actually got destroyed… and it cost the company money.

Capitalism only “regulates itself” after-the-fact. The entire economic system is based on the principle of closing the barn door after the horse has run away… on the assumption that you can at least prevent more horses from going the same way the first one went.

Some Republicans will deny this, but it is the truth. Any true “free market conservative” must embrace this core concept of the economic system

So that is our lesson for today:

The budget cuts that crippled our ability to fight ebola were not a mis-step. They were not a miscalculation, or a mistake. If you are a true free market loving conservative, you will stand by those cuts, just as you will stand by the people who will probably die as a result.

This is the way capitalism is supposed to work. This is how it was designed to work: something goes horribly wrong, and then–and only then–the market corrects itself.

As per usual, I can find no mention of this in any western MSM. Just them damn dirty Russians again. The west is so completely corrupt and rotten now that they don’t even have to make shit up like in the old cold war days.

HAMLET
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy…
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

********

The dysfunction in our culture goes really deep. Fundamentalism in all it’s forms pervades our thinking, feelings, and attitudes. It is characterized by denial, rigidity, fear, hostility, and delusional ideas. We doggedly resist awakening to the truth about the toxic world we humans have created. “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” We are sealed into our collective nightmare by our refusal to step outside of it and acknowledge our responsibility for creating it, and our further our responsibility for deconstructing it and making something better of our lives together.

The openess and humility in the face of the truth of our situation that might save us, have been rejected in favor of consoling delusions that somehow things will work out without the painful awakenings and efforts to salvage our world that are urgently called for. The unexamined fantasies and addictive behaviors that get us through our days serve as blinders to the holocaust we are engendering and trapped in.

We each and all were born into a world that was deeply into pervasive, terminal failure. Our only real and true mission is to make every effort to heal ourselves and our dying planetary life. Any attitude or activity that is not in touch with this basic reality of our situation only serves to further our descent into the collapse and final failure of the human experiment.

The whole course of our culture is largely determined by the contents of our minds in interaction with the world of nature and each other. Our only hope is to change our individual and collective thinking in positive directions. This may seem like a huge undertaking, it is. But there are ways to accomplish this
radical awakening. The only question is whether we will take this path of transformation. The cowardly pretender within us tries to persuade us to look away from the disaster of our lives. Will we find the courage to turn and face the nightmare we are responsible for creating?

I have great respect for those who choose to confront the devastating knowledge of the evil we are perpetrating, and in spite of the dispiriting understanding of the unwillingness of most of us to face it and work to change it by changing ourselves, they continue to go deeper into that pit of horror in search of understanding how we can deal with it and save ourselves and so many other innocent victims of our perfidy and cowardice. These are my brothers and sisters in the quest for a saving truth.

Ring around the rosy
A pocket full of posies
“Ashes, ashes”
We all fall down

Ron Klain, Harvard lawyer, the man who gave Joe Biden all the answers in the presidential debates, is going to be the new Ebola Czar. First, Joe Biden’s son is appointed to the board of Ukraine’s top gas producer in the putsch that didn’t quite work out and now Biden’s man Klain will, IMO, be put in charge of protecting Wall St. from Ebola, Dr. Lurie, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and the citizen sheep be damned. There is only one thing to do, start shooting down airliners suspected of carrying Ebola and blame it on Putin, establish marshal law, blame the collapse of the economy on Ebola while rich bastards luxuriate at their private Hawaiian getaways. Previous to this outbreak we have mentioned the possibility of “someone” releasing lethal pandemic creating biological agents. Does anyone question the super infectiousness of this variant of Ebola?

“The US Department of Defense (DoD) is funding Ebola trials on humans, trials which started just weeks before the Ebola outbreak in Guinea and Sierra Leone. The reports continue and state that the DoD gave a contract worth $140 million dollars to Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, to conduct Ebola research. This research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the deadly Ebola virus. Hence, the DoD is listed as a collaborator in a “First in Human” Ebola clinical trial (NCT02041715, which started in January 2014 shortly before an Ebola epidemic was declared in West Africa in March.” – Dr. Cyril Broderick, Liberian Professor of Plant Pathology.

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]

Australia is experiencing a rapid energy transition & is on track to reach 100% renewable energy by 2032 at approximately zero net cost! Most of the developing countries in sunbelt can follow this path too & avoid the damage to the earth's climate.

Stomach Of Dead Whale Contained 'Nothing But Nonstop Plastic'

Mount Everest: Melting glaciers expose dead bodies. Several studies show that glaciers in the Everest region, as in most parts of the Himalayas, are fast melting and thinning.

US climate policy must protect forests and communities, not the forest industry